Doctor Pay and Social Priorities

Med-school grads make less than business-school grads, and take on far more risk. Is this model sustainable?

By

John Schnapp

July 19, 2012 7:11 p.m. ET

The most recent graduating class at Harvard Business School, 925 freshly minted MBAs, was culled from an initial applicant pool of 10,368, a success rate under 10%. After two years of study for which tuition alone is approximately $100,000, they took jobs whose average compensation was $120,000 plus median signing bonuses of another $20,000. Sixty-four percent of them migrated to consulting and finance.

Harvard's medical school admits 165 new students each year from an applicant pool that was 5,031 last year, an even more...